The Dry Salvages

The title comes from the name of a marine rock formation off the coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where he spent time at as a child.

Within the poem, Eliot invokes the image of Krishna to emphasise the need to follow the divine will, instead of seeking personal gain.

Eliot began working on The Dry Salvages during World War II, at a time when London was experiencing air-raids near the end of 1940.

[2] According to a note by Eliot under the title, "The Dry Salvages—presumably les trois sauvages—is a small group of rocks, with a beacon, off the north east coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts.

Originally, these images and the other personal references were intended to be discussed in an autobiographical work that was to collect a series of essays about Eliot's childhood.

Images of men drowning dominate the section before giving way to a brief insight into how science and ideas on evolution separate mankind from a proper understanding of the past.

Here, the narrator suggests that life is like "drifting wreckage" and a "boat with a slow leakage", emphasizing a sense of aimless persistence in the face of mortality and existential ambiguity.

[6][7] In the third section, the narrator invokes the Bhagavad Gita, wherein the wise creator god Krishna tells the uncertain warrior Arjuna that the divine will, and not future benefits or rewards, matters, comparing the audience to "voyagers".

The narrator urges the audience to "fare forward" without being bound by past or future, underscoring a timeless journey of self-realization where each moment holds potential meaning.

Such resignation should be viewed as hinting at "the point of intersection of the timeless with time" or glimpses of the divine, leading one to become satisfied "if our temporal reversion nourish...the life of significant soil" (with a reference to East Coker in the form of "the wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning") and pushing the self towards redemption and the eternal life in the next world.

[12] Eliot invokes images of original sin and Adam's fall when talking about the past and points out that such events can be forgotten but can still affect mankind.

[16] Part of The Dry Salvages refers to Eliot's joining the Anglican Church and his personal pursuit of the divine.

[21] F. B. Pinion believed that "'The Dry Salvages' is a complicated, uneven, and rather prosy poem, in which Eliot continues to say the same thing, with some progression, mainly in maritime imagery".